What Is A Webinar?

Wednesday, May 14th, 2014 at
10:00 am

I thought I’d write today about what a webinar is.

This was really prompted by a visit to my mum’s yesterday. She’s a great mum and she has always been supportive of my plans, even if they were a little crazy at times – anyway, that’s a great topic for another post.

So there I am drinking tea and chatting about what I’m up to and I know she doesn’t understand too much about the internet, so I try to keep it fairly simple, but I casually tell her that I’ve been taking part in a number of webinars.

I didn’t really think about the fact that it’s a fairly new word and that she wouldn’t know what it was. Although she doesn’t have a computer or even an internet connection, she does take an interest in new stuff that’s happening and so she said “what’s a webinar?”.

Of course, that got me thinking that there might be a number of other people asking exactly the same question. It’s like anything, if you’re not involved in it, you might not know about it.

So a webinar is basically an online seminar. You can’t see the other people though and you generally can’t even hear them. In fact, you don’t even know who you’re sharing the experience with – oops, that’s sounding a little strange…

I guess in a way, it’s like watching a TV programme, where there’s the presenter/s and you. Obviously it’s like an educational TV programme as you’re usually learning about a new piece of software or a new tactic. They are usually limited to 1000 people although that’s probably more to do with current technology and I guess that number will increase in the future.

The big difference between TV and a webinar is that you can ask the presenter/s questions live during the broadcast. These are usually entered into a small text box called a chat box and when there is a moment, if they are relevant, they may get answered.

It’s actually really cool when they say “Oh, Eddie Tee from the UK asked blah, blah, blah…” and they give you the answer, or maybe that’s just me

This is just another wonderful feat of the internet and related technologies. Wow, I really love all this stuff.